the Movie Share Who Raped the Girl

Vi years ago, when ii high-school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, raped a sixteen-year-sometime daughter and texted video of the assault to their friends, the instance was among the first of its kind to go viral on social media and subsequently spark national outrage and eventual prosecution. The movie , from first-time author-managing director Pippa Bianco, tells a similar story, simply her moving picture — acutely aware of the #MeToo climate in which information technology emerges — is told from the victim's perspective.

Based on Bianco's 2015 curt of the aforementioned name, Share is an immersive teen drama nearly Mandy (played by British newcomer Rhianne Barreto), a loftier schooler who wakes up face up down in her front yard later a night of partying with friends that she doesn't remember. The next day, she receives multiple texts of a video of her beingness assaulted while blackout drunk; it is unclear exactly who the perpetrators are. Her life is upended, she becomes a pariah at school and we spend the residual of the pic trying to figure out exactly what happened.

The Bottom Line A #MeToo-era tale that never preaches.

Aided by down-to-world portrayals and a compelling cinematographic throughline that echoes the both ordinary and circuitous nature of this kind of violence, Share blurs genre lines between coming-of-age drama and thriller. Information technology'southward psycho-drama calorie-free, grounded in a quietly intense portrait of how a girl, her family and a small boondocks grapple with the ugliness of sexual violence.

Bianco and her cinematographer Ava Berkofsky (HBO's Insecure) intentionally pepper the film with visuals that are hard to make out at first, mirroring the state of Mandy's memory of her trauma. Moments and images of confusion and suspended fourth dimension are intricately woven throughout the movie: a sponge slowly moving through dishwater, intermittent flashes of a street lamp in a car at night, farthermost shut-ups under blueish and greyness lite. We're meant to linger in the messiness of Mandy's experience as she discovers more than about that night and attempts to heal.

One of the most impactful moments in the moving picture is when Mandy asks her mother Kerri (wisely played by Poorna Jagannathan in a standout operation) if she and her male parent, Mickey (JC MacKenzie), call back she is to blame for the set on. Her female parent quickly refutes that shaming notion, and yous tin can't help but wish that every real-life Mandy would have someone like this in her corner.

Just as of import, Kerri explains how clueless men can be when it comes to the prevalence of assault. She tells Mandy that even for her own (white, direct) hubby, Mandy's sexual assault is utterly surprising and likely his start personal connection to a survivor, while Kerri has long known that sexual assault happens "every minute of every 24-hour interval."

Statistics show that people who commit rape are rarely strangers in the dark, but instead friends and lovers that victims interact with day-to-day, and when it comes to the nuances of rape and survivorship, the picture show is well-researched and clearly informed by the experiences of bodily survivors. The teenage boys in Share by and large don't understand what constitutes sexual assault, but the moving picture neither lets them off the claw nor pathologizes them. Instead, we're meant to stay with Mandy and how she navigates having to come across her declared perpetrators — once friends she trusted who've become something much more than fraught overnight — in grade and around town.

But in showing Mandy's vulnerability, Bianco doesn't practise then at the expense of her lead's agency. In a ride with her father in his huge 4×4 truck, she admits to him that no 1 made her drinkable that dark and that she enjoys going to parties, getting drunk and hooking up — you know, being a typical teenager. Although it's clearly hard for him to hear this from his teenage daughter, in his fatherly style he yet makes sure she knows that just because she was boozer doesn't mean anyone has the correct to assault her.

That the empathetic, informed performances that both of the actors playing Mandy's parents deliver never experience corny or unearned is impressive in a film that could take hands veered into later on-school-special territory. The dialogue feels effortless, and the seamless ensemble ensures there'due south rarely a moment when you're taken out of the story. On the other hand, the score feels largely out-of-sync with the movie's overall muted tone, attempting to amp upwardly the thriller-esque moments.

If the storytelling in Share flounders anywhere, information technology is in the concluding scene. Key information about what happened to Mandy the night she was assaulted comes to light, and she makes a choice that, different the rest of the movie, feels a bit too quick and easy; the filmmakers might accept given a fleck more insight into why she fabricated the choice that she did. She is in some ways more of a mystery to united states of america at the end than she was at the beginning.

Still, overall, Share is a mature and insightful characteristic debut that shows how trauma and low-cal can co-be in the life of a victim turned survivor. Ane tin can only imagine that if the Jane Doe in the Steubenville case had had the chance to see a motion picture like this, it would have helped her feel less isolated and the burden of what happened to her a bit lighter.

Production companies: A24, Loveless
Benefactor: A24
Cast: Rhianne Barreto, Charlie Plummer, Poorna Jagannathan, JC MacKenzie, Nicholas Galitzine, Danny Mastrogiorgio, Lovie Simone
Author-managing director: Pippa Bianco
Producers: Carly Hugo, Matt Parker Tyler Byrne
Co-producer: Matt Code
Director of photography: Ava Berkofsky
Production designer: Kelly McGehee
Editor: Shelby Siegel
Music supervisors: Andreas Brauming Arcos, Matthew Hearon-Smith
Casting: Avy Kaufman
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition)